Improve Time Management

Continuing from the previous entry, Time Well Spent, the third step in increasing your time management skills is to prioritize, plan, and prosper.

Prioritize

Prioritization is essential when you feel there is not enough hours in a day and too many items on your to-do list. Making sure you focus on the right activities that give you your biggest results with the least amount of effort is essential. Using the activity information from Time Well Spent, do the following actions for easy prioritization:

– Add up all the minutes spent on activities in each category.
– After adding up the minutes, in which quadrant do you spend the most time? If your greatest amount of time isn’t in Big Benefits, there is room for improvement.
– Decide which quadrant you will focus to change first. This can be decided on by the number of activities in the quadrant, the results you get from the activities, effort spent on the activities, or because they are the activities you like doing the most.

Prioritization is about narrowing your focus. The next step is to create a plan that ensures your desired results.

Plan

In order to stay on track, it’s imperative to plan for success. Reducing your stress and increasing your results won’t just happen by luck. Planning includes actions like delete item, delegate item, decrease/increase time spent on an item, alter item, or avoid item. Continue to use your information:

– On a sheet of paper make three columns; Current Activity, New Activity, and Expected Results.
– For the quadrant, you have prioritized, list all of the current activities in the first column.
– In the next column, write an alternative action you can take with this activity.
– In the last column, list any expected results you want to have using your new actions. This will serve as a tracking method to see how successful you are.

Work your plan for at least one week before your review and make changes. Often people want instant results and don’t give their new actions time to take hold. When they do though, they prosper!

Prosper

To prosper is to allow yourself to go through change and experience the rewards of your hard work. To fully prosper from your new time management skills and reduce your situational stress, keep these tips in mind:

1) Change is hard, scary, and unpredictable. You’re right. Over it? Move on.
2) Keep the end results in mind. It gives you something to look forward to.
3) Filling in gaps allows you to seize opportunities. Soon you will have a NEW NORMAL!
4) There is rich learning taking place during change if you look for it.

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